The Democrat Who Republicans Miss the Most

Today’s notice: Republicans imagine life if Nancy Pelosi were still leading Democrats. Kamala Harris shows that not all campaign rallies on the National Mall end in federal crimes. We are not at this exact moment living in a world where low-propensity voters show up in droves. And on Mark Robinson’s planet, it’s sunny all the time.

The Speaker Emerita Gets the Speaker Omertà Treatment

Republican politics have changed a lot since 2010, but through all the ups and downs, the GOP has leaned heavily on a consistent attack line — the one that accuses vulnerable Democrats of being in cahoots with the worst Democrat of all: Nancy Pelosi.

That is, until now.

With Pelosi no longer in leadership and a fresh generation of up-and-coming Democrats jockeying for the spotlight, Republicans told NOTUS that hammering Pelosi as the ultimate bogeyman just doesn’t pack the same punch.

While the NRCC and CLF have dropped occasional ads and statements linking vulnerable Democrats to the former speaker, the House GOP is more focused these days on bashing the Biden-Harris administration. There’s a certain sadness in that for the Republicans who invested millions of dollars and over a decade into building up their chief antagonist.

“In some ways, when she’s gone, they will miss her a lot,” former Rep. Steve Stivers, who chaired the NRCC in 2018, told NOTUS. “She was a name that had been in politics a long time that people recognized.”

As Pelosi fades out of the attack ads, the GOP doesn’t seem to have landed on a new villain in the House. With relatively low name recognition, the Democrats’ new leader, Hakeem Jeffries, hasn’t been featured heavily in Republican ads just yet. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pops up occasionally, but she has hardly gotten the same attention as Pelosi.

And yet, as Republicans search for a new adversary, they still have Pelosi on their mind. As her ally Dan Kildee put it: “When it comes to Republicans, they love to hate her, but they can’t deny the fact they respect her.”

—Riley Rogerson | Read the story here.

You Get a Closing Argument and You Get a Closing Argument and You…

Kamala Harris delivered a closing argument speech for that sometimes confusing and narrow group: those who “are still considering who to vote for — or whether you’ll vote at all.”

For those voters, there were several speeches: her bio, her economic plans, her health care promises. A speech on reproductive rights. And a vow “to always put country above party and above self.”

“Look, I recognize this has not been a typical campaign,” she said. “I know many of you are still getting to know who I am.”

It has been the challenge for Democrats, who only had a few weeks to launch this campaign and now only have a matter of days to close it out. They are trying to make sure everyone who might possibly vote against Trump, for whatever reason, is getting a push.

NOTUS’ Jasmine Wright watched the process up close in Wisconsin’s WOW counties. Democrats there are in an all-out “effort to target the ‘Nikki Haley voter,’” a quixotic group who showed up to try to take out Trump in the primary but now must be cajoled into doing the same in the general.

As Harris’ kitchen sink speech showed, it’s not exactly clear what will get these voters — mostly women — off the couch. So Democrats are going through a frustrating process of trying, well, everything.

“I can’t believe we’re banking our entire existence as a society on white women,” one Democrat close to the vice president told Jasmine.

Read the story here.

Front Page

• Mark Robinson’s Campaign Insists It’s Actually Fine That Trump Is Staying Away: The Robinson campaign puts on rose-colored glasses and mutes the haters.
• Duck and Weave: Trump’s Allentown Rally Ends Without Him Really Addressing the Puerto Rico Controversy: Trump had every opportunity Tuesday to address the comments. He wouldn’t do it. At least not directly.
• Democrats Are Blanketing Small Newspapers With Ads in the Election’s Last Sprint: A new strategy, shared first with NOTUS.
• Steve Bannon, Fresh Out of Prison, Returns to Air With a Vengeance: “There’s a lot of lessons there for the MAGA movement,” Bannon said about his time in prison.

Jon Ralston on the Nevada Horse Race

No one knows which way this election is headed. To make sense of one key swing state, we called up the guru on all things Nevada: Jon Ralston.

On the early voting returns: Ralston was clear the early returns favor the Republicans.

“I mean, no one can argue that when they have 38,000 more ballots than the Democrats, and so they should feel pretty good, and I think some of them are,” he said.

But Ralston urged caution before jumping to conclusions. He’s still watching the total number of ballots out of Clark County, where the votes favored Dems 2-to-1 the last two cycles. The other “wild card,” he said, is how independents break.

“The Democrats are very confident that a lot of those are their people, young people, and that they’re going to negate the Republican ballot lead. But right now, we just don’t know.”

On Latino voters: The demographic makes up 20% of the electorate and Ralston said the question was whether Harris could get to “the magic 60% threshold” with Hispanics.

“And we don’t know the answer yet,” he said. “There’s been polling data that shows her slipping into the mid-50s, and that could cost her the race.”

“On the other hand,” he continued, “Hispanics are known for deciding late, at least a certain cohort of Hispanics, and so I think there’s some hope on the Democratic side that she will get Latino men eventually, who may be Trump-curious now.”

On Jacky Rosen ahead of Harris: Ralston called this question the “conundrum of the cycle.”

“Who are these Trump-Rosen voters?” he asked. “I don’t know if they exist or not. I think that race is going to be much closer than the public polling has shown. We just don’t have blowouts in Nevada Senate races.”

—Riley Rogerson

Number You Should Know

8%

That’s the share of low-propensity voters who turned out early for Republicans in Pennsylvania, according to data compiled from TargetSmart. In the Sun Belt states, that number is around 10%. What does that mean?

“By nature, that unregistered population, the lower-propensity population, should be a more Republican audience, so to not see that materializing at this point for Republicans is a sign for concern,” TargetSmart senior adviser Tom Bonier told reporters Tuesday.

“The Republicans aren’t building the type of margins that we believe that they need to build to be able to go into Election Day with,” Bonier said.

—Katherine Swartz

ThisIsFineDog.jpg

What do you do when your campaign is behind double digits in polls, top staff have resigned, the national party has pulled support and your candidate’s name has become shorthand for self-inflicted implosion? NOTUS’ Calen Razor reports on the final days of Mark Robinson’s campaign for North Carolina governor, which is operating in its own dimension.

“The morale of the campaign is higher than it’s been in a very long time, and probably since the primary,” Robinson adviser Matt Hurley told Calen. Trump is nowhere to be found supporting a guy who once had a prominent place in the MAGA universe. This is fine and totally normal, says Hurley, because Robinson, who CNN reported last month has a history of posting racist and sexually explicit messages on a porn website’s chat forum, is targeting moderate independent voters — and primarily women, whereas Trump’s focus is on rallying the base.

Read the story here.

Not Us

We know NOTUS reporters can’t cover it all. Here’s some other great hits by … not us.

• X Algorithm Feeds Users Political Content — Whether They Want It or Not by Jack Gillum, Alexa Corse and Adrienne Tong at The Wall Street Journal
• Voters could reshape American election systems in 7 states by Burgess Everett at Semafor
• Facebook Is Auto-Generating Militia Group Pages as Extremists Continue to Organize in Plain Sight by Tess Owen at Wired

Be Social

Riley and Oriana tried to bring you an original photo of the horses. Turns out the neigh-sayers are stealthier than you’d think.

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